Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc6 to cap off the week that he describes as " nobody can claim that last week was *normal*, but whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombieapocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), it doesn't seem to have affected the kernel much. "

Linux 5.17 continues moving closer to release and will see its stable debut in hopefully two weeks time. Linux 5.16-rc6 comes in as a fairly normal release candidates with the usual code churn, but Linus does express some caution over some lingering issues that could hold up the final release.

Linus commented, " While things look reasonably normal, we _are_ getting pretty late in the release, and we still have a number of known regressions. They don't seem all that big and scary, but some of them were reported right after the rc1 release, so they are getting a bit long in the tooth. I'd hate to have to delay 5.17 just because of them, and I'm starting to be a bit worried here. I think all the affected maintainers know who they are... "

More details in the Linux 5.17-rc6 announcement . See our Linux 5.17 feature overview for a look at all of the changes coming into this next kernel version.